Personalization encompasses many tactics from recommendations to ABM campaigns to exit messages to segment-based communications. Point solution vendors have cropped up over the years to offer solutions for each of these personalization tactics individually and for each separate channel.

Yet these point solutions force marketers into a trap. You buy one tool to meet a current need. Then you need to buy a different one when you recognize another need. Then you need to buy another. You get the idea.

Let’s explore exactly what this trap looks like for demand gen marketers.

The Trap

I often speak with B2B tech companies who have around four to five vendors that supply various personalization capabilities. They usually fit into these groups:

IP Address Lookup

These days, many B2B marketers focused on demand generation are also investing in account-based marketing capabilities to target specific accounts on their websites. These marketers often begin the process by investing in a data provider, such as Demandbase, to help them identify the company name and industry of their visitors via IP address.

Personalization Based on IP Address

After identifying the visitor’s company name and industry, many marketers then purchase another solution to allow them to personalize parts of their website to target those companies and industries with specific messages and experiences.

Exit Messaging

Some marketers choose to purchase another solution to provide exit messaging to their visitors. Whether they use it to encourage downloads, sign-ups for newsletters, free trials, etc., last-chance messaging — either targeted to the whole audience or specific segments — is often supplied by a separate solution.

Basic Rule-Based Personalization

Often when demand gen marketers first start dipping their toes in website personalization, they opt to purchase a basic rule-based personalization solution. This solution is usually focused on personalizing based on segments in the company’s marketing automation system, and the depth of behavioral understanding is limited.

CMS Rule-Based Personalization

Instead of the basic rule-based personalization solution, some demand gen marketers will spend more with their CMS vendor to try to leverage their CMS vendor’s basic rule-based personalization capabilities, without realizing how hard it will be to work with a rat’s nest of rules that don’t tie to other systems or other channels or provide the flexibility to personalize any part of the website.

Content Recommendations

As a final form of personalization, some demand gen marketers apply content recommendations on their blogs to improve engagement. These solutions are often unrelated to other systems and operate exclusively on the company blog, without tracking behaviors across the rest of the website.

The Solution to the Trap

When you buy a product to help you with your content recommendations, another one to provide exit messaging, and then another to help you with account-based marketing, you’re in the personalization point solution trap. And it can be tough to get out of that trap when you’re only thinking about the short term.

But Evergage can help you address all of the areas above in one complete and integrated solution that takes personalization to the next level of power and ease. Evergage is a full experience one-to-one personalization solution combining testing, targeting, machine-learning algorithms, analytics, and attribution across channels.

An Evergage customer often starts off using one of these capabilities and then adds additional ones over time in order to realize a complete personalization vision across all the tactics described above and more.

The Benefits of a Unified Personalization Platform

Cost Savings: Evergage can provide more functionality than your existing three to five personalization tool vendors, but it costs far less than all those solutions together.

Efficiency: You only need to learn one platform and maintain a relationship with one vendor. And you can seamlessly integrate functionality. For example, you can put a recommendation into a bounce campaign and target it to the relevant segment in just a few clicks.

Power/Results. With a complete solution, you’re able to tie visitor behavior from your website, web app and mobile app into one unified customer profile. And you’re able to look at attribution in an integrated way. In short, you’re able to do much more with fewer restrictions and avoid data silos.

Learn more about how Evergage can help you avoid the personalization point solution trap by requesting a demo today.